Author
Topic: Interested in helping out (Read 226 times)

I'm not really into the libertarian bullshit that other people do in the bitcoin/marketplace space. I however have came to the conclusion that while I really do not believe in the mission behind the power of these markets, I do want to see the technology advanced. If market software is going to exist, it should be done right.

My motivation for wanting to help:

Just because we're here to work on market software that gives a stupid amount of power to other individuals doesn't mean that we can't do things that are actually good while doing this. We could have solutions in place so that the software takes a percentage of commissions to donate to charities by default. (I'm sure we could easily think of some who could benefit considering who we're likely to be impacting by working on something like this)

My opinion on the state of bitcoin marketplaces:

I have issues with the centralization of many of the market platforms. That is, I do not think in any situation markets should be storing bitcoins locally. It doesn't make sense that a user of a market should ever be forced to to trust another single party. In the real world, when you pay for your goods, you have multiple layers of protection that doesn't require that level of trust. It should be done the same way on the markets. (as in, not require the trust of a single party)

I think the way to combat the issue of centralized solutions, is to have it attacked with competition that proves it's obsolete. And I have a few ideas (which may not be unique, but are much better than what most others are considering using) for better escrow solutions than simply multi-sig. I don't feel like multi-sig that expects the buyer to use it is ever going to work out. If we're going to use multi-sig, then we need to do so in a way that doesn't force the least technical user to learn new things.

And finally, some questions for you:

What are your motivations for building crypto marketplace software?

Is this a political statement to you? Or is this more of a technological statement?

How have you stayed motivated for so long?

Is this something that is still in progress? Or am I just replying on a dead forum?

What are your goals for this project? What do you want from it?

How concerned should we be about security around here? While we're not technically doing anything illegal, it's definitely something that's looked down upon. What are you opinions on best practices while browsing this forum?

Anyway, that's all I have to say for now. It's nice to meet you guys, and I'm interested in helping out.

"We could have solutions in place so that the software takes a percentage of commissions to donate to charities by default. "Not really possible..it is free and open source code, anyone can change it so the funds are allocated to just seller and marketplace. I would rather have this just be a tool for people to use, and then they can opt into whatever they like, such as if they want to donate. The goal of this is privacy, security, etc -- forcing a percent to be donated, or even encouraging that potentially jeaprodizes such goals.

What are your motivations for building crypto marketplace software?My honest answer is I'd like to lower the barrier to entry for people who want to start darknet marketplaces, and for it to act as a nucleating point for various libraries related to cryptocurrency and other privacy-preserving tools. Hopefully, we can create some Monero PHP libraries that get used in other software.

There is maybe a more moderate answer about helping grow the cryptocurrency economy, but for me it's not about that, it's about providing a tool that gives people power.

Is this a political statement to you? Or is this more of a technological statement? Both, but ultimately the tech interests me because of political views. I am not sure how you mean technologically - as tech isn't interesting without considering it's implications/utility.

How have you stayed motivated for so long?

Idealism and positive reinforcement. However, it is important to note that I have lost interest in this one fewer times than I have been interested in it:

Bitwasp idea originally came about in 2012, flopped because no one had any real interest in it. Then when silkroad got shut down - everyone had a huge interest in it which revived it - which we made another attempt at it again, got pretty far and then it just flopped again thanks to loss of interest due to the OpenBazaar hype. Additionally, I had become a bit disillusioned with bitcoin since it was so public and had so many issues. Monero inspired me again, and so I figured: hey, let's revive this yet again because I really do want an open source, free marketplace software available. It seems like this project teeters on people being just enough interested to help, but that it really struggles to get good traction. I have way more experience with fundraising, developing software and networking with reporters, ec than ever before, and we're closer than ever before - so this time it should be a home run. Hopefully then we'll see it get more traction and others actually using it, developing addons/apps for it and so forth.

Is this something that is still in progress? Or am I just replying on a dead forum?Still very much in progress, we're doing some stuff behind the scenes with Monero's RPC and figuring out how to do multisig -- it's a bit of a hold up because the multisig RPC isn't merged - we're developing with what exists currently in a branch, but

What are your goals for this project? What do you want from it?A very secure, actively developed free and open source privacy oriented monero marketplace software that anyone can setup and use, and that helps to build various libraries for Monero, and other privacy-preserving tools.

That's both the goal of the project and what I want from it; I like to be involved with such a thing.

How concerned should we be about security around here? While we're not technically doing anything illegal, it's definitely something that's looked down upon. What are you opinions on best practices while browsing this forum?

Depends on who you are: if you're a software developer, it likely is fine to be public: I believe the previous coder, afk11, basically got a pretty good job out of it since his coding/efforts were noticed.

The flip side to that has I had a very involved death threat come to all of my emails/fb/etc after posting about this project on the SR1 forums the first time. Law enforcement is probably lazily watching it, or will be able to look at stuff retroactively via google cache, etc

Ultimately, you have to decide for what you are doing with it, who you are, your intentions, etc. I have obviously opted to attach my real name to it.